First of all: the Cleveland Museum of Art’s “Picasso and Paper” exhibition was excellent—of course it was. A life-spanning survey of works on paper and cardboard, punctuated with occasional canvasses and bronzes, by this most innovative, prolific, and driven of Modernists could hardly fail to be anything short of engrossing, and sometimes astonishing. The show was packed with works, several from the CMA’s own collection. From his shockingly accomplished academic drawings done when he was a teenager, to the initial doodles for his bombshell Les Demoiselles d’Avignon; from his Cubist collages to a cardboard costume designed for a Jean Cocteau ballet; from a post-war obsession with Delacroix and Manet to the final room where a scene from Clouzot’s documentary-of-sorts The Mystery of Picasso was looping: this exhibition was an embarrassment of riches. (Afterwards, anyone feeling pangs about praising this notorious misogynist could find copies of Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma—a book-length essay on the “art vs. the artist” problem with a cover photo of the man himself, bare-chested and wearing a papier-mâché minotaur mask—on sale in the gift shop, not far from the novelty coffee mugs and fridge magnets.)

        But Picasso wasn’t what brought me to the CMA. It was a smaller, more nuanced exhibition that inspired me to commit the (some would say irrational) act of driving nearly three hours each way from Detroit to Cleveland and back, all in one cold February day. The timing of “Imagination in the Age of Reason” is… interesting. With the rise of authoritarianism on one side of the political spectrum, the interrogation of systemic injustices on the other, and cynicism and skepticism about science and democracy across the board, it would seem that the Age of Reason hasn’t aged well. Announcing on social media that you mean to, in the words of the Enlightenment’s hype man Immanuel Kant, “use (your) own understanding without the guidance of another” will likely mark you out as a troll or a nut rather than the heroic freethinker you think you are. To be fair, the Enlightenment has been getting pushback since its inception; in fact, it was my recent (late to the party) interest in William Blake, a visionary whose emphasis on human imagination was at odds with the rationalist thinkers of his day, that made spending six hours on the road to see this show seem reasonable to me. But in many of the forty-some prints and drawings in Imagination in the Age of Reason, all taken from the CMA’s own impressive collection, the fanciful and the factual often work together, to critique, entertain, or just move merchandise.

        The show is divided into four sections. In the first, on “Optics and Illusion,” physical vision and creative vision dovetail to produce images that are innovative, amusing—and salable. Louis-Marin Bonnet’s quaint (if somewhat neotenic and anime-ish) etchings of women, such as The Milk Woman, utilized techniques made possible by advances in optical science to emulate the pastel drawings that were popular among collectors. Renowned British animal painter George Stubbs used the then-new technique of soft-ground etching to bring drawing-like textures to his print of A Sleeping Leopard (the beast sweetly grasps its tail in its front paws in a way that will charm cat lovers). Maria Catharina Prestel’s aquatints mimicked the qualities of ink wash drawings, while Henry Fuseli (famous for The Nightmare) turned to lithography to preserve the energy of his pen-and-ink work. Of course, there’s a trompe l’oeil image included, a meticulously rendered still life complete with handbills and a drawing-within-a-drawing that invites viewers to pore over its details and unravel its secrets.

        The most impressive image in this section, and one of the anchors of the show, is Jean-Étienne Liotard’s masterfully rendered pastel portrait of François Tronchin, a Swiss art collector who hobnobbed with such Enlightenment luminaries as Voltaire and Diderot. Seated at a small table covered in sheet music, diagrams, precision instruments, and a book, Tronchin invites us to inspect the pride of his collection, Rembrandt’s A Woman in Bed. Liotard has brightened up the Dutch master’s painting, making it more a part of Tronchin’s enlightened world than Rembrandt’s earthier one. There’s a humorous disconnect between the intellectual accoutrements of Tronchin’s study and the image of a smiling, scantily clad woman on the lookout for her lover in the painting, but somehow Tronchin looks like he’d appreciate the irony.

         The section on “Imagined Landscapes” includes images that demonstrate eighteenth-century Europe’s fascination with natural phenomena in far-off lands—volcanic eruptions, exotic flora and fauna—as well as its attitude of racial superiority over the “savages” populating those lands. Joseph Constantine Stadler’s illustrations of newly discovered plant life, for instance, are meticulously rendered and scientifically accurate, but they’re presented sprouting in environments that suit the fancies of his botanist patron more than they would the plants themselves. On a wallpaper-like sheet of printed cotton cloth entitled The Four Continents, the peoples of the non-European world are depicted with less accuracy and respect than the closely observed foliage and animals surrounding them.

        A suite of engravings describing The Most Notable Things Seen by John Wilkins Erudite English Bishop during His Famous Voyage from the Earth to the Moon imagines an excursion into space complete with alien humanoids who, while clever in their ability to tame flying serpents, fashion outlandish contraptions, and make their homes in giant pumpkins, are also depicted as “primitives,” amalgams of racist tropes associated with Native Americans and Asians. (This is a problem faced still by modern science fiction, such as the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises: how to present a species of “others” without leaning on hoary stereotypes of actual human peoples. The Avatar films, for example, have been accused of conjuring a race of noble but imperiled savages in need of a white savior to rescue them.)

        Speaking of sci-fi movies, some of the prints in the section on “capriccios”—fantastical scenes of structures and interiors inspired by actual locations—would serve well as set designs for a Ridley Scott film. The forbidding architecture and gloomy lighting of German theatrical designer Abel Schlicht’s Subterranean Jail for the Stage would well suit a Blade Runner sequel, while Louis Jean Desprez’ Tomb with Sphinxes and an Owl, a mashup of Roman catacombs and Egyptian graves complete with made-up “hieroglyphics,” vaguely evokes the eerie sleep pods and sarcophagi seen in the Alien films.

        Others have noted that the work of Alien designer H.R. Giger resonates with that of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, represented here by Prisoners on a Projecting Platform from his series Imaginary Prisons; anonymous bodies lashed to posts writhe against the backdrop of an oppressive architectural hellscape, all catwalks and arches and rising steam. Another Piranesi print here, The Tomb of Nero, depicts a complex scene of picturesque decay, with crumbling fragments of Roman splendor overgrown by foliage and infested with snakes, proof that “ruin porn” is hardly a new concept. Fanciful as these and other scenes in this section are, though, they were often based on first-hand observation of real sites.

        This interest with ancient cultures and far-flung lands was also fodder for humor, as seen in the section on “Folly and Social Critique,” in which artists turn their imaginations to mocking the sins and foibles of society’s various fools, Enlightened and otherwise. In Inventor of Greek Figures, French architect Ennemond Alexandre Petitot (in an etching by Benigno Bossi) lampoons the European craze for ancient Greece (and apparently Egypt as well) by dressing his self-portrait in a rather silly philosopher’s toga and a sash decorated with the Greek key, as well as square glasses and a striped, pharaoh-ish headdress that would do Sun Ra or Devo proud. Meanwhile, in Woman Standing Among the Friars, British artist John Brown takes aim at a gaggle of Roman clergymen, notorious to the Brits for their decadence. They scowl, stare pop-eyed, or stroke their beards lasciviously as an attractive (if tiny-headed) woman in a low-cut dress glides through the crowd, her expression a mix of knowing amusement and exasperation.

        Less humorous and somewhat harder to decipher than these jokey illustrations are three small images by Francisco Goya, from his series lambasting Spanish society, Los Caprichos. They depict small groups of women with withered bodies and gnarled faces, their physical ugliness meant to reflect their moral character; they may be witches and/or sex workers. In the print They Have Flown, three of these crones seem to whisk away a sad-faced young woman with a large butterfly in her hair, perhaps carrying the fragile creature off to a life of iniquity.

        I’ve learned to be suspicious of quotes attributed to Einstein that I find on the internet, so I confirmed this one: “Imagination is more important than knowledge”—meaning, it’s speculation and thought experiments that lead you to hard facts. A mezzotint here by William Pether (based on a painting by Joseph Wright), exemplifies the idea. In The Alchymist, In Search of the Philosopher’s Stone, Discovers Phosphorus, ancient pipe dreams of transmuting base metal to gold have led one Hennig Brand to instead stumble upon something more wondrous: the first non-naturally occurring element ever discovered, a substance unknown to Antiquity. The bearded proto-scientist is shown basking in the glow of the stuff in his beaker, enlightened in more ways than one.

        The relationship between imagination and reason is not a simple Kirk/Spock dichotomy, but, for better and for worse, an interaction as complex as the human mind and the world it moves through. “Everything you can imagine is real,” Picasso is said to have quipped. I can’t find a source for that quote, but it’s nice to think that it’s true.

Sean Bieri, a cartoonist and graphic designer, has written on art for the Detroit Metro Times, Wayne State University, and the Erb Family Foundation among other outlets. He received both his BFA and a BA in Art History—28 years apart—from Wayne State. He is a founding member of Hatch, an arts collective based in the Detroit enclave of Hamtramck, where he lives. He is currently assisting Hatch in the renovation of the “Hamtramck Disneyland” folk art site.